Opinion

Editorials

A figure cited by a letter writer in a recent issue of the British magazine New Scientist grabbed my attention this week: 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the manufacture of steel and concrete.
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Public Comment

Doctors want to see patients and help people, not fill out paperwork. Give them one framework under which they perform their jobs, and every doctor will become more efficient. Want to save costs? Make it so those who spend decades learning their science spend their time using it, not wasting man months per year filling out differing insurance paperwork.
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Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP) has reviewed the present proposal for a ferry terminal at the Berkeley Marina as presented to the Berkeley Waterfront Commission in October 2009. CESP now strongly urges the Berkeley City Council to deny permission for a terminal at the proposed site.
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There is no example more real, and relevant, as to why Berkeley should welcome a ferry system back onto its shores than the recent, and painful, days long closure of the Bay Bridge. And, according to a professional poll taken in April 2005, 83 percent of Berkeleyans think this restoration of service is a good idea.
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The Berkeley City Council will vote on Nov. 17 whether to endorse construction of a ferry terminal at the Berkeley Marina between the fishing pier and Hs Lordships restaurant. This vote is premature because of unresolved, significant reservations expressed by Berkeley’s three cognizant commissions: Planning, Transportation, and Waterfront.
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In her latest book Bright-Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich contends that positive thinking can render you powerless when it overrides reality. It did so for a man I knew whose face was being eaten by cancer. He dabbed at the suppurating wound with a handkerchief while sunnily burbling about everything but that or seeking treatment. I wondered how he could so blithely ignore what was obvious to everyone else. I wonder the same about the UC administrators and regents.
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What? Manufacturing in Berkeley? Of course. In the United States the largest economic sector is manufacturing. Manufacturing accounts for 70 percent of R & D. Manufacturing pays better. For every dollar paid to production workers, service workers receive 75 cents. Retail jobs pay 50 cents.
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President Lyndon Johnson once said that you can’t sell chicken poop as chicken soup. Only he didn’t say poop. New Yorker’s have a saying “money talks and bull manure walks” only they don’t say manure. I have found, especially over the last eight years, that both of these truisms are wrong. When you mix money with any kind of manure you can sell chicken poop as soup and money plus manure always rides in limousines. I am writing to counter the deep manure and the heavy money that is driving the changes to the West Berkeley Plan.
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Our city is on the verge of an incredible achievement. Across the country, city officials and their school district counterparts often bicker about everything under the sun relating to youth and their needs within a given jurisdiction. All the while, the children they are responsible for educating are lost in the shuffle. Low-income, African-American and Latino children fall the furthest behind and often drop out of the system altogether.
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I don’t believe in human nature, said Prof. Dongping Han, a participant in China’s Cultural Revolution and now a Professor of History at Warren Wilson College. In the Cultural Revolution, he said, we didn’t have to care about ourselves, because others cared about us.
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